The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #1 – Nobody Likes Bollywood

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one of them.

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Student of the Year
Directed by Karan Johar, 2012

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WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?

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Through the intercession of those occasional bursts of English common to Hindi-language films, the monoglot can discern that St. Teresa’s High School is India’s premiere academic institution. Thus grounded, the ensuing barrage of flailing bodies and flashing lights reveals two suspiciously adult-looking male students who are clearly in love, though the rigors of the recently-opened Student of the Year Competition (also in English) will cruelly rip them apart. Obviously this is all a metaphor for the sociopathy engendered by globalized capitalism in an emerging market, thereby revealing Karan Johar as a stealth Marxist – perhaps the stealthiest in history, judging from all those brand names. Also, there’s a girl and a burning tree.

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

In the beginning, i.e 1989, there was an auteur by the name of Sooraj R. Barjatya who, at the age of 24, with the might of a production company established by his grandfather behind him, directed a film titled Maine Pyar Kiya. Tracking the rich boy/poor girl romance of its protagonists through multiple societal and familial tribulations, the film was hardly the first of its kind — a similarly goopy (if more mechanical) hit titled Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak had debuted just one year prior — but it nonetheless struck a chord with a public tired of the generic excess that marked the Bollywood of the ’80s. Barjatya was young, and driven by a religious-minded zeal for wholesome entertainment steeped in traditional family values; his art was stylized and idealized, but intently focused on interpersonal dynamics.

He returned in 1994 with his magnum opus, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, a 200-minute, 14-song gargantuan sprawl of earthy romantic devotion that sparked a veritable revolution in Indian theatergoing – buffeted by the advent of home video, the movie house found unexpected salvation as a public venue for family togetherness. Box office receipts were fucking ridiculous.

Among the scores of industry personnel whose lids were flipped was Aditya Chopra, scion of Yash Raj Films, a production company that had left an indelible mark on Bollywood through the pastel romances of founder Yash Chopra. Emboldened by Barjatya’s success, the young Chopra, also aged 24, released his directorial debut in 1995: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a savory bowl of cosmopolitan mush so popular that one particular Mumbai theater continued to run daily showings well into the 21st century. Yet while Barjatya’s films remained devoutly focused on Indian concerns, Chopra’s twist was to incorporate the non-resident Indian (“NRI”) experience into the action, positioning the Yash Raj brand as a global platform for homemade entertainment, aimed at monied Indian nostalgists and curious fellow travelers worldwide.

Most critical to our narrative, however, is DDLJ’s neophyte co-writer, assistant director, bit part actor and associate costume designer: Karan Johar, a Chopra friend and yet another heir to a movie studio, Yash Johar’s Dharma Productions. Johar had also became close with the film’s lead performer, Shahrukh Khan (“SRK”), a Delhi-based theater and television actor who rocketed to Mumbai movie mega-stardom over the course of the early ‘90s. Leapfrogging off of Chopra’s success, Johar teamed with SRK for his own directorial debut in 1998, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which dressed the NRI-minded focus of Chopra’s film in every designer label its comparatively wizened 26-year old director could yank free from the London racks. It was a supreme work of dissolvable ultra-kitsch, foregrounding the artifice of its love story so severely it bordered on auto-critique, though it did command some real drama too: that of Karan Johar, who in his youth turned up his nose at the tackiness of Bollywood, and — to strike an ill-fitting protestant note — was born again on the set of DDLJ. Through a conglomeration of costume, he would isolate the ridiculousness of what he was doing, and then love it anyway.

Yet if Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was flagrantly trendy, it was also unwaveringly conservative; for SRK to truly understand his love for tomboy heroine Kajol Mukherjee — herself returning from the earlier Chopra film — she must renounce her taste in sherbert-hued overalls and dress like a proper goddamned lady. In this way, the audience is soothed – assured that the global tastes of the young will not trammel the value of tradition. Such is the key to mass appeal.

Popular as they were, these films were not always well-received by aesthetes, or devotees of more action-oriented fighting/dancing/joking/romancing Bollywood masala. “Candyfloss” became the slur of choice for Johar’s cinema, connoting banality for those who wished for a more sophisticated Bollywood, and effeminacy for those content with a more strapping brand of fantasy. Having been teased over his effete mannerisms since childhood, the latter criticisms appear to have washed off Johar, though he did seem to respond to the former, as his later films tackled notions of familial estrangement (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…, 2001) and sexual infidelity (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, 2006), if always in a distinctly soapy idiom. This evolution reached its peak with the 2010 release of My Name Is Khan, a glossy tragicomedy of well-to-do Muslim angst in post-9/11 America; by this time SRK was co-producing via his own company, Red Chillies Entertainment, always with an eye toward expanding his global brand. The film wound up making most of its money outside a domestic Indian market which treated it coolly.

Indeed, if you study the Indian box office of today’s Bollywood, we have rather come back to the old days of macho masala, with hulking superstars like Salman Khan — ironically, also the male lead in those Sooraj R. Barjatya pictures from years ago — winking and flexing their way through remakes of formula product out of the Telugu-language industry down south. Johar knows this, as one of his most successful recent productions was a 2012 remake of Agneepath, originally a 1990 potboiler his father took a bath on in the wake of the very wave of ‘family’ cinema that would revive Dharma Productions.

In this way, Student of the Year, so flashy and simplistic, can be seen as both a throwback to the glory days of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, as well as its director’s throwing down of the gauntlet at the feet of the neo-masala wave – a new spin of candyfloss for a history that seems determined to repeat itself.

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WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

WAIT, WAIT – WHAT’S AN INTERVAL?

Good question! An “interval” is what is typically called an “intermission” in the North American parlance. Most Indian popular films have an interval, at which time the movie stops and snack vendors roam the aisles like at a sporting event (or, if you happen to be watching these things digitally beamed into a North American megaplex, you immediately visit Twitter). Ideally, some sort of thrilling cliffhanger or punchy bit of dialogue will occur just before the interval, so as to maintain the audience’s energy – in the South industry (i.e. Telugu, Tamil-language productions) this is called the Interval Bang. Critics therefore cannot resist gauging the efficacy of the film both pre- and post-interval.

Mind you, this description is premised on the operating procedures of your classic Indian single-screen theater, of which there are more than 10,000 nationwide. There are also a smaller number of multiplexes, which may or may not function in the same manner. Nor will all single-screen theaters play the same releases – an additional stereotype brands the local single-screen as a haven for “mass” films, i.e. movies that appeal to the general working public. The urban multiplex, in contrast, allegedly supports “class” films, which seek to appeal to a more superficially sophisticated, young, wealthy-ish clientele.

To combine “mass” and “class” is to know the highest success in Hindi pop cinema, and Karan Johar — himself a nearly perfect-bred “class” viewer — has done just that at times, although the comparatively weak domestic returns on My Name Is Khan have been attributed to a remote subject matter with little applicability to the immediate desires of the filmgoing public.

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OKAY, THANKS. SO, WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Why, several immediate desires are duly met.

I should probably mention at this point that Bollywood — which, by the popular Western understanding, encompasses basically the whole of Indian cinema, though I will only use it to designate products of the Hindi-language industry based in the former Bombay — is probably the least reputable of the major world cinemas among English-reliant cinephiles. Talk to a film buff in my neck of the internet, and nine out of ten will instantly dismiss the stuff as garbage, fluff and nonsense, commercial imbecilities farted to life by career hacks who wouldn’t last a minute in the big show of Real Movies. Frequently, reactions become emotional. Bollywood is ’embarrassing.’ Just look at those clowns hopping around – why can’t you watch South Korean crime movies? Hell, even a Korean television drama would be preferable; this shit’s as cringe-worthy as anime, and at least anime has decent violence sometimes.

I’ve watched anime since I was 14, so I’d heard it all before. I’d heard the newer complaints about manga too: that it’s comics for little girls, or gay men. Some of that connotation seeps into the omnibus complaints about Bollywood. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of crap in Hindi film — or that it doesn’t have devotees who swear everything was better in the ’70s — but I do suspect the sheer enormity of the scene, Japanese comics and Indian movies alike, supports a tendency to speak broadly and intimidates even open-minded commentators from delving deeper.

It is true, however, that contemporary Bollywood films have a way of idealizing the male body to an extent that’s unique to world cinema. But then, the notion of masala, a term borrowed from blends of spices used in cooking, after all, demands that something for everyone be included. Songs in crime dramas! Slapstick in tragedies! Dudes leaping twenty feet into the air in social satire! Unlike Japanese comics, which arrived at its women-friendly reputation by sharply dividing itself into semi-discreet zones of demographic appeal, Indian popular cinema of the Hindi/Tamil/Telugu variety often just tries to be as audience-inclusive as possible in any given situation, which results in both a novel ‘exotic’ surface (songs in crime dramas) as well as the occasional crossing of cultural taboos, i.e. thou-shalt-not-linger-on-a-guy’s-abs-in-a-movie-that’s-not-specifically-for-girls.

Thus, Student of the Year introduces one of its male leads with a shimmering close-up of his glistening six-pack as he strums a guitar. This is Varun Dhawan, one of the film’s three debutante stars; SRK’s Red Chillies may still be co-producing, but now Johar is focused on breaking new talent. All of them are first presented to us by revealing close-ups of body parts; heroine Alia Bhatt‘s teeny feet totter in a tall pair of designer shoes, rich yet vulnerable, while the other male lead, Sidharth Malhotra, is first seen from behind, his broad back stretching out a fine leather jacket. Importantly, he is the only one of the stars not affiliated with one of Bollywood’s dynastic film families; Dhawan and Bhatt are both children of prolific directors. He’s a rebel, you see.

Moreover, in-story, Malhotra is attending St. Teresa’s on scholarship, while the other two — characterized immediately as the sort of longtime couple that can’t recall what they like in each other anymore — are simply rich as fuck. Both Dhawan and Malhotra served as assistant directors on My Name Is Khan, so it’s not difficult to imagine story writer Johar — assisted by screenwriter Rensil D’Silva and dialogue writer Niranjan Iyengar — concocting his scenario from the ‘school’ of filmmaking that is a set full of young people, one of them maybe connected, another maybe not. There’s even a ‘director’ of sorts presiding over St. Teresa’s scrum: Rishi Kapoor, old-time star of the massive ’73 inter-class teen romance landmark Bobby, playing a tremendously camp dean of students prone to stroking hidden magazine covers of perennial Bollywood hunk John Abraham and sexually harassing a handsome Coach, who himself is the catalyst for Malhotra & Dhawan to stop hating each other and fall in loBECOME GOOD FRIENDS.

All of this is depicted in long flashbacks as various supporting characters mill about in a hospital where the Dean lays dying, alone and unloved – regretful of the relationships he smashed for his fondness of conflict! This mild criticism of competitive education is ripped straight out of the highest grossing film in Bollywood history, 2009’s 3 Idiots — an ‘inspirational comedy’ most notable for a scene where the film’s cast of engineering students revives a dead baby by chanting the movie’s catchphrase — and can easily be disregarded. The meat is in the evolving relationship of the male leads, and, to a *much* lesser extent, their relationship with poor Bhatt, who seems doomed on a conceptual level – the main guys are proper Bollywood hunks in their mid-’20s, while Bhatt is a young 19. In other words, she actually looks like a high school girl, which doesn’t at all fit Johar’s artifice, glamming her up to an absurd degree so that she seems frequently ill at ease in front of the camera.

Another issue: Dhawan is the only one of the three that can actually dance. Normally this isn’t too much a problem, as you can ‘fake’ Bollywood dancing through clever editing — and, obviously, nobody is really singing, there’s professionals for that (and albums to release with those professionals’ bankable names — but if one member of the main cast actually is better at dancing than everyone else, he or she inevitably begins to hog the song sequences. Distracting as this is, though, it still sort of fits the plot, since Dhawan’s rich boy character, alas, only wishes his Cruel Businessman Father would respect his love for music, though the wicked man secretly prefers foe-turned-friend Malhotra, who’s got an eye for finance. EVEN WORSE, Bhatt and Malhotra start to pretend they *like-like* each other as a scheme to get Dhawan to pay more attention to the comprehensively neglected lass, but OMG, then Malhotra starts to really fall in love with her!!!!

All of this climaxes in (the controversial) Radha, a supremely goofy wedding dance and probably the peppiest of music duo Vishal–Shekhar’s compositions for a soundtrack so overstuffed there’s sub-songs that bridge longer songs together.

Still, watch that video above, and see how Johar (and one or more of the film’s four choreographers) communicates the entire drama between Dhawan (in gold), Malhotra & Bhatt, even on mute, largely through motion and exaggerated, silent cinema-worthy body language. Johar then depicts the ceremony itself — the lead cast are guests — as a wordless flourish of images accompanied by a tinkling piano score, until an agonized Malhotra joins hands with Bhatt, only for her to slowly pull herself away, and then – the orchestra swells.

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WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

Shit gets real.

Seriously though, much of the second half of the film is concerned with the Student of the Year Competition, divided into four parts: (1) standardized test; (2) treasure hunt; (3) dance competition; (4) triathlon. Malhotra is keen to win, having pinned his financial future on the access to a top college the prize will net. Dhawan, meanwhile, wants to prove his worth to his Bad Dad — relations deteriorate to the point where he’s booted out of the house and must fend for himself economically — while also taking down Malhotra, whom he caught smooching the increasingly irrelevant Bhatt, to booming percussion on the soundtrack. Nobody steals his lover, goddamn it Alia.

But wait.

I’m making an awful lot of gay jokes here, surely more than is welcome on an enlightened web portal such as this. The thing is, Johar is making the same jokes, and honestly… I’m not sure either of us are really joking. More than once, Malhotra quips that it seems the emotionally needier Dhawan is about to kiss him. All the while, Dhawan neglects his ostensible girlfriend, Bhatt, only reacting when she flirts with Malhotra. As the film wore on, I began to wonder if Johar was playing a quiet game, subtly contrasting the shrill, quintessentially filmi gay stereotype of the Dean against something of greater emotional verisimilitude.

It’s difficult to talk about homosexuality in Bollywood. Part of the traditional, cliche appeal of foreign cinema to English-dominant North Americans is its departure from domestic morality, but mainline Indian movies share the NA movie dichotomy — violence is okay for display, while sex is best hidden — at a much lower intensity. Top of the line Bollywood movies often won’t progress beyond lip-kissing onscreen, and dramatic depictions of gay relationships are rare.

Redolent of this uncertainty is a movie Johar produced in 2008: Dostana, starring Abhishek Bachchan and the aforementioned John Abraham as a pair of men who pretend to be gay to secure a nice living arrangement in proximity to a woman they both pursue. Neither gets the girl in the end, and it’s hinted that a genuine attraction has developed between the two. The truth, however, remains as private as Johar’s own personal life, though rumors always, always swirl: about him and SRK, about him and Sidharth Malhotra. How does one score a leading man role in this town without connections, after all?

In Student of the Year, Johar is more willing to let go of things. Toward the end of the film, the Dean — the Director — is castigated by a fat, nerdy student for the ten million or so obvious logical shortcomings of the Student of the Year scheme; as in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Johar underlines the artificiality of his construct, but now the older director shows the Dean become sad and withdrawn. He never maintains a real relationship with a man. As he dies, his movie’s cast around him, he stares into the eyes of the Coach, the object of his lust, uncomprehending of his true desires, and all he can whisper is “that’s life,” as if he’d thrown a party as a cry for help.

By this time we’ve found out who won the competition: it was Dhawan, but only because Malhotra held back at the last minute, to disgust Dhawan’s father and thereby prove himself the more calculating player. Then he marries Bhatt and becomes a zillionaire tycoon, while Dhawan apparently throws the prestige of his prize away and becomes a famous (presumably shirtless) rock star. Like 3 Idiots, the message boils down to ‘follow your dreams, but try and select dreams that will get you a middle-class life, because being poor is pretty loathsome.’

Yet some things are not filled in for Dhawan. He is not apparently married, nor does he have any girlfriend. He claims to have bedded 100 women, although this is immediately shown to be a lie. He and Malhotra confront one another immediately, but quickly resume friendly relations. It’s a happy Bollywood ending, competition fermented into a woozy nostalgia, but also tinged with mystery, unspoken secrets hovering as the two grown men return to St. Teresa’s, and loosen their clothes as they prepare to revisit their final race for real, gazing into each other’s eyes, alone, as the frame freezes, and the color fades, and the director’s name appears onscreen before a final fade to black.

The idea could be that the future remains in the hands of “Our New Generation” – but know, dear audience, that we are not there yet.

25 thoughts on “The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #1 – Nobody Likes Bollywood

  1. Is this really going to be a series? I’m stoked-everytime I go to an Indian restaurant the music fills me with an urge to see a Bollywood movie, which I’ve never done and I don’t know where to start. For some reason I have a block on just grabbing one, probably because if I choose wrong The Boss will never allow another in the house.

    My parents got into Bollywood for a while, but after they’d watched all the wedding movies they had to settle for drug deals gone wrong, and their passion cooled.

  2. Between seeing Hum Aapke Hain Koun in the theaters when I was 14–fully packed house attended by entire extended families at a time–and hearing the soundtrack of that repeated for years on loop until Kuch Kuch Hota Hai came along, by the time I was heading off to college I was fairly resolute in my belief that I would sooner put a bullet through my brain than sit through another one of these movies start to finish ever again.

    The problem isn’t related to the CONTENT of the films as your writeup suggests. It’s not that these movies don’t have their moments. The problem is that that these movies HAVE their moments…and ONLY their moments. That’s the nature of masala; when you need to have a little bit of something for everybody it’s more likely that little bits of the picture here and there are all you are about. And if you’re like me, where one of the things you detest most in film is “people singing and dancing” (same as real life), then you’re kind of sunk because that’s most of the movie. That’s what drove ME away from Disney to anime as a kid: I like cartoons and loathe musicals.

    By virtue of my family and my desire to find outlandish video, I still have some tangential awareness of Indian cinema. Certainly, when I went to see Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (“you know Anil Kapoor is in this, right?” –my dad), I couldn’t help but notice the coming soon poster for Don 2: The Chase Continues. But please, please, PLEASE give me that chapter skip button. Or a Youtube digest “best moments of.” The movie trailer can probably hit all the high points. I can show people “the Bollywood Assassin’s Creed” and haha, they’ll laugh and think this is pretty great stuff…for a couple of minutes. But then it just keeps going without doing anything else.

    So while much of the disdain for Bollywood is for exactly the reasons you say, I truly believe that pacing is the underlying root cause of the hate. If they’d only just put the same amount of “stuff of merit happening” into say, a 90 to 120 minute running time they would have something more globally digestible. But then, that’d contradict directly with what the domestic audience desires in order to their money’s worth. The Indian cinema and Japanese animation industries have that much in common with one another, at least.

  3. Jog, the homosocial tension is interesting because it seems so in sync with American culture in a lot of ways. Eve Sedgwick’s book Between Men is all about how women are used as a kind of combination blind and bridge for the expression of male-male bonds. And of course this happens all the time in comics, where the supeheroes most intense relationships tend to be with the (male) supervillains (often mediated through captured damsel in distresses, etc.)

    I guess what seems a little different is that there seems maybe less rivalry in this between the men? The relationship seems less fraught? Though it’s hard to tell since I haven’t seen the film of course.

  4. @Aaron White

    The movies you chose will depend on your tastes. As a little help to that, you can approach your choices by the story and the director – the basic ‘what’s in there’ and ‘how it’s delivered’.

    Maniratnam is a director who makes good movies (Nayagan, Thevar Magan, Bombay, Saathiya, and a good many more are notable). Then there’s his friend RGV who is reputed for experimenting and for gangster films. His more liked works include Satya, Shiva, Company, Sarkar, Rakht Charitra, and horror films like Raat, Bhoot, and Phoonk. Anurag Kashyap is another notable director whose films are interesting to folks who hate the masala types of films. He made films like Gangs of Wasseypur, No Smoking, and a couple of others I can’t recall right away. There are a few more directors like Vishal Bharadwaj, Rakesh Om Prakash Mehra, etc whose moves are well taken by many. Then there’s Mahesh Bhatt who made a good name for himself in the 80s and got off his own way later.

    Leaving the above mentioned aside, the films about whom you’ll hear by the name of the on-screen stars – especially of the three ‘Khan’s – are generally bullshit, with Aamir Khan being a good exception since he stars in many movies received well in an intellectual sense. Usually the bullshit movies are directed by guys who are not mentioned in the earlier paragraph, and those ignominous directors generally include scions of Bombay film studio families like Chopras, Johars, Bharjatyas, and Bhatts.

  5. I’ll have some more detailed responses in a few hours, but for now: yes, this is an ongoing column, although I do plan to focus mainly on new theatrical releases, which necessarily means an irregular schedule. Think of me as the cough you can’t shake.

    Also: did anyone else notice the Bigg Boss update on Robot 6 this morning? That’s one of the bigger Indian reality tv shows, (although the aformentioned Salman Khan is the host, not a “contestant”). Truly an auspicious omen for this most triumphant of days!

  6. Why carry a spade to a souffle? Trying to understand Bollywood using your “oh so evolved” sensibilities, is such a waste of time and effort. And then to actually come out and pen a whole blog post, tsk tsk.

    Ok, since you obvious don’t “get it”, this is how it works. Everything in Bollywood mainstream movies is subservient to the visual. Everything. And that includes story-lines, plots, etc. The movie is mostly seen in increments, just imagine a series of “shorts” that go into making the whole. One short could be related to the other, but it’s not important. Oh, but there’s no logic in that! Well, sure. But screw logic. It’s all about the visual. Pretty people, pretty camera angles, pretty backgrounds, pretty music, colour, etc. The “shorts” serve only one purpose, to get a quick emotional reaction from you; a reaction that you need not carry to the next scene. Ya, like I said, fuck logic.

    Having said this, defending Bollywood is like defending the Catholic church for pedophilia. It’s umm… not going to work out too well for the Pope.

    As for nobody liking Bollywood, I’m afraid about a billion humans would disagree.

  7. An excellent comment, Rajiv – I will begin by noting that mine are among the least evolved sensibilities on this webpage, aesthetically and perhaps physiologically.

    Moreover, I think your closing line, while true, is misdirected in intent; when I say “Nobody” likes Bollywood, I refer to the English-dominant film buffs of my acquaintance, and the culture they’ve built around them, which often acts to expel huge numbers of films meaningful to countless viewers – the “Nobody” is my little joke, as I hope the post makes clear.

    Your comments on visual appeal and increments are well-taken; it recalls a comment I once heard from Shahrukh Khan in an interview, that the ‘classic’ Bollywood film is like cabaret, i.e. an evening’s entertainment unbeholden to notions of typical literary or cinematic depth. I presume you do not refer to some of the works by directors Agyaat mentioned above, as some of them directly oppose the “pretty” aspects you identify, while remaining essentially ‘mainstream’ in intent – but for the tip-top mainline stuff, it is a very *sensual* cinema.

    I agree with this. I like this! The first Bollywood film I saw in a theater, almost three years ago, was the dubiously-received Salman Khan vehicle Veer – nobody’s idea of a classic (except maybe Salman’s)! But I was transfixed by the confident artifice of the film, the ease it had with spectacle; it was an immediate and visceral response, one I often do still associate with the Bollywood mainline.

    At the same time, though, I do feel that these movies often contain deeper suggestions; this is the purpose of this post, to explore what Student of the Year might say about history, about its director, and from there – about its popular affect. It will always be a skewed perspective, since I am American, and share no direct links to India; but then, I try to write honestly, and as informedly as I can, and from there, perhaps, my outsider’s perspective will be useful.

    In other words, I’m not trying to whack these movies apart with a spade, but maybe I’ll dig a few things up. I hope you’ll forgive the imposition!

  8. Aaron – So, what might the Boss be interested in? Unfortunately, a lot of my personal gateway choices aren’t available on Netflix at the moment, and I don’t know where you’re located in terms of buying stuff. Nonetheless, my top three (new-ish, mainline stuff only) would be:

    1. Om Shanti Om – Maybe the catchiest soundtrack in recent years, which is more important to first impressions than you’d think; as Daryl suggests, if you’ve got problems with singing & dancing, then you’ve got a lot of problems with Bollywood. This is kind of a half spoof, half adoring homage to ’70s masala, with some terrific images and a likeable reincarnation plot. Romance too, and charisma to burn from SRK in the kind of ‘star!’ performance he can do pretty well.

    2. Singham – Best in show for the neo-masala style, which is pretty unexpected, since its director is known mainly for shrill, hyperactive comedies that have never once translated for me. Unblinking but still quite knowingly absurd macho cop extravaganza, with lion roars on the soundtrack and a denouement bizarrely reminiscent of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, albeit without the cannibalism. This is the movie I linked to above as “a more strapping brand of fantasy.”

    3. Enthiran (or: Robot) – Actually a Tamil movie, but nonetheless either the first or second-highest grossing film in Indian cinema history, and starring maybe the single biggest movie star in the country, Superstar Rajinikanth (yes, that’s his actual credit). Famous for its completely uninhibited CG orgy of a final action scene — it’s basically an endless Sega Genesis transforming boss fight writ large — but I like to think of it as the single most faithful rendition of an Osamu Tezuka youth robot manga ever made (despite not being based on a Tezuka manga, and coming from people whom I’m not certain have ever heard of Tezuka), which is to say to retains all of the empathetic, the-real-monster-here-is-man themes, as well as *all* of the tone-smashing slapstick comedy. There’s even a scene where someone talks to bugs.

    (Daryl, have you seen this??)

    Bear in mind Daryl’s comments about pacing – the shortest of these movies (Singham) is 2hrs. 18mins., and the other two are pushing three hours each. I’ve personally found I got used to the overstuffed style of these movies with time, although these three should move at a decent clip anyway.

    If you’re limited to Netflix, though, you can always just dive into Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge… it’s on Instant Watch.

  9. I think Rajiv’s post is pretty interesting in terms of it’s assumptions about logic and meaning. I guess my main response would be that “subservient to the visual” doesn’t mean that there’s no logic. On the contrary, that’s an extremely rigorous logic — one so rigorous it seems doubtful that it would be possible in anything but a kind of avant-garde setting that would probably be anathema to Bollywood….

    But be that as it may, the point is that just because narrative isn’t the overarching demand of the film, or just because its pleasures are shallow genre ones, doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting to talk about. On the contrary, shallow genre pleasures that connect to people so intimately that they seem natural — not even worth commenting on — can in fact tell you a lot about how people are put together — what they want, what they think of as pleasurable, what they think of as natural, what they think they need (and don’t need) in their entertainment, which is not unrelated to what they think they need and don’t need in their lives.

    Not that you need to be interested in Bollywood or in Jog writing about Bollywood. But…what you reject (more or less adamantly) can also tell something, or be a topic for exegesis (as I’ve perhaps demonstrated at too much length.)

  10. Noah – Oh, the relationship between the men gets very fraught, but only after the interval, when they really start competing… I just have a hard time considering Alia Bhatt to be a bridge to anything. Mostly she serves as a strictly (if accidentally) antagonizing force; the guys meet and get to like each other just fine without her, and often interact on their own… she basically vanishes for the climax too.

    Agyaat – This is a good list of what I’d call ‘alternative mainstream’ guys. The “RGV” he mentions is Ram Gopal Varma, an influential director and sort of an industry gadfly who bounces between the Hindi and Telugu scenes. I tend to like his older stuff a little better… he did a really well-shot crime picture in 1998 called Satya, in which Manoj Bajpai gives a great performance as an emotionally needy gangster. More recently he’s been on a consumer-grade video kick, which has resulted in a near-unwatchable microbudget Telugu movie (Dongala Mutha) and a weird Bollywood approximation of a ’90s Oliver Stone-styled corruption saga (Department), which unfortunately proved to be just as silly as a typical masala movie, if in a different cadence…

    (Er, I’m kind of addressing readers generally here, Agyaat – you probably know all of this already…)

    FYI, RGV and Anurag Kashyap are the two guys Danny Boyle looked to while making Slumdog Millionaire, although he somehow wound up with something WAAAAY slicker and poppier and more simplistic than those two would bother with… I could probably do a whole essay on Kashyap’s agonized relationship with the Bollywood mainstream, which is slightly reminiscent of a stereotypical ’90s alternative cartoonist angsting over superheroes. My favorite of his is 2009’s Dev.D, a feminist rendition of the famous Bengali novel/Bollywood adaptation mainstay Devdas. I just saw Gangs of Wasseypur the other week… all 5hrs. 20mins. Some terrific scenes, but his attempt to create a novelistic depth felt more like an inability to edit extraneous detail…

  11. Oh, I’ve certainly seen Endhiran/Enthiran (who am I kidding, I stick with “Robot”). That one actually got radio ads for the theatrical showings down here in Florida, but it had already gotten Internet notoriety due to a Youtube clip of the finale making the rounds on US geek news sites.

    But even the crazy-go-nuts world of Telugu blockbusters is subject to the same issues I expressed in the last post. They have their moments of inspired genius, but the remainder can often be a slog to get through. It’s like an even longer version of the experience gained from watching one of those Godfrey Ho movies where you spend the whole time waiting for it to cut back to the guys in garish “NINJA” outfits duking it out in Kowloon Park.

    Similarly, if you show someone the clip where Chiranjeevi has that horse chase against the police most are liable to go nuts when he drifts the horse under the car. But show the full movie and you likely can’t really sustain that enthusiasm. Before Robot, I’d seen the one musical bit from Sivaji where Rajnikanth rolls in like Trinity on his motorcycle and blows away the bad guys during his song and dance number. “Now THIS I gotta see!” I thought. But that’s not exactly the tone held by the rest of the movie.

    Rajiv’s point about everything being made as vignettes is well said, since it dovetails with my general sentiment: this stuff works better when consumed as short vignettes more than it does as an extended whole…because they’re made as vignettes.

  12. “If you’re limited to Netflix, though, you can always just dive into Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge… it’s on Instant Watch.”

    Ah, thanks! I’ve been kinda-sorta meaning to check out some Bollywood at some point, but with absolutely no idea where to start, it’s good to have a recommendation of something that I have access to. I’ll try to check this one out, and maybe even report back with my findings.

  13. I agree with the comments about the visual nature of those films. My biggest impression from watching several Bollywood films was how MTV-like everything felt.

    Anyway, to me it sounds like Bollywood films (at least the handful that I’ve seen) have the opposite problem of Hollywood. If Bollywood films in general have too much music, then Hollywood films don’t have enough. At least in regards to teen and populist-leaning films. If you’re going to be disposable, at least have some music in it if only to make the proceedings more palatable to more demanding movie viewers. And surely there’s some huge marketing opportunities being missed by not having the latest pop release directly linked up with the latest movie release.

    I always liked this song from the film “Dil Chahta Hai.” Possibly the lone highlight from that film. Not to mention in a lot of ways a perfect distillation of the outlook of the “New” India.

  14. Oh, and last time I bothered to count, Netflix possibly has hundreds of Bollywood films on DVD.

  15. Nothing to add really, just wanted to chime in that this post is great and hilarious. “Obviously this is all a metaphor for the sociopathy engendered by globalized capitalism in an emerging market, thereby revealing Karan Johar as a stealth Marxist”; “Unlike Japanese comics, which arrived at its women-friendly reputation by sharply dividing itself into semi-discreet zones of demographic appeal”; and the parts relating Malhotra’s outsider status with his character’s outsider status were probably my favorite bits. Also the gay jokes. I finally saw East of Eden the other day…

    I think it can be more fun and meaningful to look for these stealth messages in mainstream art than to look for them in independent cinema, even when the messages are clearer, or more nuanced, or better executed, or less afraid, in indie cinema… which they aren’t always! Maybe it’s just the thrill of having a secret right out there in the open. It’s art that belongs to many people – the “pop” in popular – but also to you, in a special way, because you have received the message. Something like that anyway.

  16. I think Eve Sedgwick talks about the idea that the definition of camp is looking at a piece of art and saying, “what if the people who made this were gay?”

  17. Oh, this is just…just delightful. Very happy to have this column to read every (I hope) month. I’ve been absolutely terrible about keeping up with Bollywood ever since I left the cozy confines of my undergrad Asian Film Club…I think the most recent film I’ve seen might be 2004’s Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… (which features a great Amitabh Bachchan turn as the head of a daycare who’s obsessed with re-staging Vietnam guerrilla warfare with the kids, but in a funny way?) Though I have a copy of Krrish (the full-on superhero sequel to the E.T. meets Flowers for Algernon as Comedy Action Spielbergesque Extravaganza that was the superhit Koi…Mil Gaya) but I still haven’t gotten around to watching it.

    Anyway, the moral of the story is Bollywood + Jog is a fantastic way for the President to celebrate his election to a second term, and I’m glad he’s taken this bold step in leadership of the seemingly free world.

  18. Krrish! That one’s both kind of great and potentially intolerable for two reasons: (1) about 3/5 of the movie is a homage to Mort Weisinger era Superman comics where he plays tricks on Lois to hide his identity… like, that’s the *whole* comedy track, it’s seriously an hour plus of screen time; (2) Hrithik Roshan delivers a wholesome! and energetic! performance so far over-the-top you begin to wonder if maybe *he’s* right and the rest of acting is wrong – it definitely hails from the era before somebody told him the secret to a tough and sensitive hero was to brood and scowl nonstop…

  19. From Maine Pyar Kiya, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak until DDLJ I like to watch every Bollywood movies. In Bollywood movies is always show the main actor is perfect human. But there are a different story in movies Dhadkan and KKKG, both of the movies is nice unlike the common other of bollywood movies. There are different sense which can make cry in deep of sad….I’m wait bollywood movies like Dhadkan and KKKG, please tell me if there are movies like both.

  20. Now I want a post on Nollywood movies daggummit! Those are films I just don’t understand. On any level.

    Jog, I love the way you write. It would be interesting to see your take on a Nollywood film.

  21. Oh man, I’ve been aware of that stuff for a while, since the little boomlet of documentaries on the scene in the late ’00s, but I’d need to do some work to get into shape for any kind of writing beyond a strictly novice “what’s this?” kind of thing. It’s a long-term goal, though. And thanks for the kind words!

  22. It takes a lot of courage for a purely science student and a laymen to arts to try and comment on a blog post full of art and theater intellectuals with mastery in writing skills. I just wish to applaud and thank you for such an enlightening study of the industry and the movie.

    I just couldn’t help pondering over the fact that for a person as interested and as knowledgeable about Hindi cinema as you, why would you study and analyze movies as shallow as The Student of the Year? I agree that most of the Indian blockbuster hits are just junk, but there’s also a small number of excellent and praiseworthy cinema that manages to win the hearts of the audience and shoot up to popularity. I would just for once, love to see your amazing talent spent on analyzing something that is actually an important work of art (from what, of course, are the eyes of a layman) is worthy of your time and genius. Take the newly released movie, Queen for example. The leading lady isn’t dressed in the ‘sherbet-hued overalls’ and the plot is every bit unconventional to the Indian scenario, yet the movie is as real as it can get to the sensibilities that are essentially Indian.

    By the way “Kajol” and “[Rani] Mukherjee” are two different actresses who starred in the 1999 hit (and one of my childhood favorites) Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (although you and everyone else here may probably already know that).

  23. Thank you! I appreciate such kind words, and please don’t feel intimidated.

    Honestly, one of the reasons I’d wanted to write about Student of the Year is *because* it’s quite shallow-looking and artificial; I’ve found that movies like that don’t tend to attract very much in the way of substantial attention (for obvious reasons), and yet – Karan Johar did arrive at an interesting position in Hindi movie history, and I think by reading his work closely you can understand some things about popular expectations just from the way they are coded into this pretty contraption.

    I’ve not seen Queen, though given that it’s an Anurag Kashyap production I’d expect it to be (or at least attempt to be) more substantial than the norm. Frankly, releases have slowed down tremendously where I’m at; we haven’t gotten anything in theaters since Gunday back in February, and I passed on that one. A few places over state lines are playing Bhoothnath Returns right now, but it’s not the kind of film I’d travel for.

    Re: Kajol – I do believe her and Rani are cousins; truthfully, it might have been less confusing if I’d simply used her typical mononym credit (or her married name, Devgan), but I’d wanted to be period-appropriate with my details…

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